What other preamps have you tried in your demo room ?The XP 32 is now our Reference at Sound Insight’s showroom.
It has The most clarity and focus of any preamp We have heard to date.
The noise floor is actually very impressive as well.
This video was taken at our customers house who wanted to audition it and compare it to his state of the art vacuum tube preamp. Headphones will definitely help give you a sense of the tonality.
Stereophile has now put the Pass Labs XP-32 preamp review online for those of you that do not have a subscription. Here is the link:Hot off the press!
I just received my 2021 March copy of Stereophile Magazine. They have a review of the XP-32 in it. The XP-32 three piece unit made the front cover along with the new Wilson SabrinaX. The teaser text on the cover is "We Savor Pass Labs Triple-Decker Preamp." I have not read the review yet, but it looks like there are 5 pages to the review, if you do not count the intermingled ad pages, which makes it twice as long.
In my late December post I predicted a review was likely going to show up, given Pass Labs had full page ads for it recently in Stereophile and TAS.
About the only thing good about being an audiophile in Iowa is that we seem to get the Stereophile and Absolute Sound magazines earlier than anyone else and usually on the same day. I suspect both magazines are distributed from Iowa because we are centrally located in the country. Watch the mailbox for your copy
Enjoy!
If you read the Stereophile review of the Pass Labs XP-32 you likely saw the reference to DC couple the outputs. There is no mention of this ability in the manual. I recently implemented the DC coupling option as depicted in the attached PDF file. There are two spare jumpers in the text box describing changing the gain of the preamp. Note that the reference to change gain via jumpers J1 and J2 are incorrect. J1 and J2 are actually the jumper locations to implement the DC coupling option. These two jumper locations short out the 100 uF and 0.1 uF capacitors that are in parallel with each other in each phase of the XLR outputs. The directions for changing the gain of the preamp in the text block should be calling out J3 and J4. Note that DC coupling the outputs will likely cause a DC offset on the output on the preamp that will be an issue if your amplifier is not AC coupled! With my XP-32 unit the DC coupled output configuration caused offsets of up to 20 mV. If your amplifier is DC coupled and/or does not have a DC servo that can deal with this much of an DC offset the output of the amplifier could exhibit a 20 times higher DC on it's output. The offset and offset balance between the plus and minus outputs (XLR output) can be adjusted with the two potentiometers on the amplifier input board. Since my amplifier is AC coupled I have yet to adjust the two pots, so cannot comment on how much offset I could get rid of in my specific unit. I have talked with Wayne Colburn and he has indicated my unit has obviously drifted given the measurement I supplied him and could be adjusted to a much better result.Stereophile has now put the Pass Labs XP-32 preamp review online for those of you that do not have a subscription. Here is the link:
Pass Laboratories XP-32 line preamplifier
When I studied physics at university too many years ago to admit, I learned about Occam's razor. Many, many more years ago than that, Franciscan friar William of Occam stated that a hypothesis should provide the simplest possible explanation for a phenomenon.www.stereophile.com
Enjoy!
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